In Parentheses
She was one of those wispy, ferny girls, tendrils of hair cascading down in curls, drawn in segments and fragments, in tentative little curves. The whole summer we worked there, at the health club where nobody was healthy, where the women were all underweight and baking and bronzing themselves by the pool, I never heard her use a period at the end of a sentence. All of her sentences ended up in the air: “Hi, my name is Carli? I’ve worked here for six months? I love the employee discount?”
At first, Ryan and I made fun of her. We would grab an ice cream sandwich and stretch out on the chaise lounges on our breaks, giving the stink eye to any kid who dared to splash water near us. The best part of the whole deal, we agreed, was wearing the whistles on the long lanyards with the health club’s logo on it. These were what gave us the status of lifeguards instead of just high school kids who worked at the snack bar, like Carli did. We blew those whistles with a vengeance at anyone who tried to challenge our authority in the water, whether it be frolicking teenagers displaying a little too much PDA for the family pool or defiant four-year-olds who threw their stuffed animals in the water and ordered their parents to retrieve it for them (true story).
“Hi? I think I’m saying hi? But I can’t remember what I was going to say?” Ryan said, in an airy, insubstantial voice. He was looking good in that dark blue tank top, biceps and shoulders defined like sculpted marble. He wore his sandy blond hair longer that year, tied back into a little ponytail, smelling of coconut oil and chlorine.
“I can’t think of what I was going to say?” I added, wadding up the wrapper of my ice cream sandwich and shoving it into the cup holder on the chaise lounge. “Because to have something to say, I’d have to have a thought, and I don’t like those because they kind of hurt?”
He laughed. We laughed together, watching the water shine on the water, the warm sun smiling down upon us. This was our summer, and if he had not noticed me yet, that I was always there for him, and that I always planned to be, it was early in July yet. If Carli was punctuated with question marks, Ryan was struggling with ellipses that summer before he was supposed to start college.
“I don’t know….” he would say, gazing away from me, away from all of the people surrounding us.
“Maybe it’s one of those things….” he said another time, not finishing his thought, swirling the ice in his plastic cup.
I was in parentheses. (Girl next door, always a friend, never considered anything else, until one day it happens, and he looks at her with new eyes). Always a buddy, up texting until 2am about his broken heart from another girl, agreeing, empathizing, waiting.
Was I in those ellipses too? When his voice trailed off, was he thinking about me?
We got back up after our break, ready to blast those whistles. I left the wadded- up wrapper in the cup holder for Carli to discover. That was her job. I just hoped she didn’t strain her delicate self picking it up.
I had to go with my parents to a funeral. I told Carli I would be gone for a few days.
“Oh,” she said. “That’s really sad? I hope you are okay?”
I made my face go all serious. I nodded tightly, crimping my lips together.
“You didn’t even know your great-aunt,” Ryan said, coming around the corner. “And you are still so heartbroken about it. How touching.”
I poked him with the plastic spork I was using to scoop up my nachos.
“You going to add a few fake tears in there too?” he asked. Then he added, “I’ll miss you.”
He moved on to blowing the whistle at a toddler who had removed his swim diaper. I continued attacking my nachos, a big lump in my throat.
When I got back from the funeral, the late July heat had become sultry. Things that did not belong together, like skin and plastic, were stuck together in unnatural ways, saturated with sweat and humidity.
I had to believe that was the explanation.
Because when I returned from such a somber and solemn event as a family funeral, what did I see but Ryan and Carli? His arm was around her? His nose was buried in her hair as he stroked those wayward tendrils with his fingers? He spent a lot of time at the snack bar, forgetting to blow the whistle?
She had a glow about her, not the pre-cancerous kind that was on display everywhere at the health club, but one that reminded me of my nightlight as a kid, that little glass angel that chased the dark and monsters away. How had I missed this before, this light that came from inside her?
He was like a moth, absorbed by the halo around the porch light. She became an answer to every sentence that he couldn’t finish. And he was her answer, too, grounding those breathless statements, anchoring them to something solid.
(And I was there too, somewhere, undiscovered and unexplored).
I was almost through my whole shift, consuming a bag of Pringles alone on my break before he told me.
“So, Carli and I are seeing each other,” he said, as if I couldn’t see that myself, as if there weren’t enough visual cues already, as if we hadn’t spent most of the summer seeing her together before he saw her alone.
“Great,” I said. “I hope you’ll be very happy together.”
He wore the same thoughtful expression he had when his sentences trailed off into silence.
“That doesn’t sound very sincere,” he said. “How was the funeral? Everything you imagined and more?”
I felt tears rush into my eyes and clog my throat.
“Hey, sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
I got up, wordlessly, splashing feelings from my eyes, sensing them as they rolled down my cheeks and into my collar.
“I really like her,” he said from behind me (still needing me to be his friend, to be the buddy, to listen). “I don’t know…it just kind of happened….”
I went back inside and told my manager I was quitting—and asked him to mail my last paycheck—then I rode my bike home, the air cooler and more refreshing as I found speed and distance than when I was waiting and still.
Heather Bartos lives near Portland, Oregon. Her personal essays have appeared in Fatal Flaw, Stoneboat Literary Journal, miniskirt magazine, and HerStry, among others. Her flash fiction has been in The Dillydoun Review, Tangled Locks Journal, and The Closed Eye Open, and is forthcoming in Scapegoat Review, Drunk Monkeys, and Peregrine Journal.